Editorial: If SC Travel Is Out Of Hand, Ban The Outofhand Travel, Not Needed Trips
One thing the pandemic taught us was that there’s a lot more we can do and do well from our offices and homes than we ever realized.
For well-established, self-starting teams, for instance, there was little downside to working from home several days a week. A lot of routine meetings could be conducted over Zoom in a lot less time and a lot more conveniently than driving across town or across the state for a face-to-face. Some people even got comfortable with the idea of socializing via video conferencing.
The other thing we learned was that video conferencing is a wholly inadequate substitute for much of life. Most jobs can’t be performed remotely. Many employees need the structure of an office, and the presence of a supervisor, to keep focused on their work. Remote concerts and comedy shows are … watching TV. Online church is better than nothing.
And then of course there’s school. Again, remote learning is better than nothing, but if there’s anyone in South Carolina who still believes we can do anywhere close to a minimally adequate job of educating the next generation without in-person instruction, we have a ton of recent test scores to share with you.
That’s what we should keep in mind when S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom assures us that there’s plenty of room for state agencies to further reduce government travel because “during COVID we demonstrated that some meetings can be conveniently attended online, or not at all.”
We’ve never been advocates of unrestricted government travel. Indeed, we suspect that agency directors (like their counterparts in the private sector) have been too quick to approve travel to attractively located conferences and seminars as a reward to good employees, who may or may not become better employees as a result of attending.
We have lots of evidence that appointed and elected officials who get to decide for themselves whether to attend meetings in resort locations view it that way.
But that doesn’t mean you can look at the $47 million in state employee travel spending in the fiscal year that ended June 30 and conclude that it’s 5% too high. For all we know, it could be 20% too high — or too low. Indeed, Mr. Eckstrom pretty much admitted as much to The Post and Courier’s Seanna Adcox when he called on state agencies last week to reduce their travel budgets by 5%. He was simply picking a number out of the air.
Even beyond that thin-air figure, there was something disturbing about the way Mr. Eckstrom chose to roll out his annual report on state travel spending: His entire news release was about state agencies tripling their travel expenses from the previous year, without any mention of what came before that.
Of course, leaving out that crucial context is the only way calling for a 5% across-the-board cut makes any sense. Because when you add the context, it seems pretty clear that state agencies have already done what Mr. Eckstrom is asking them to do. And then some.
As Ms. Adcox reports, that $47 million in travel spending last year was indeed up from $16 million in the year that ran from July 2020 through June 2021. But it was down from $55 million in the mostly pre-pandemic year of 2019-20 — and way down from $77 million in 2018-19, the last normal year. In other words, state agencies have reduced their travel spending by nearly half since before COVID.
We’re sure there still was some inappropriate or unnecessary spending even in last year’s sharply reduced total. After all, state legislators alone spent more than $230,000 on out-of-state travel last year.
But the S.C. House was the state’s eighth-biggest travel spender because it spent $1.2 million on in-state travel — nearly all of which was to pay the 124 House members an average of about $12,000 each to drive to and from Columbia more than 20 times a year for legislative sessions. We would consider that an essential expense.
The judiciary nearly doubled its in-state travel spending last year, from $600,000 to $1.1 million — after it started holding trials again. Again: essential state business.
At DHEC, which had the fourth-highest travel spending last year, the top 10 spenders were nurses and social workers, and all of them were reimbursed only for in-state travel, and no registration costs, which suggests they were traveling to do their jobs.
Of course, the biggest travel spenders — as always — were Clemson University and the University South Carolina. And as always, their biggest spenders were coaches, who have to go where the kids are if they want to recruit players who can help teams win.
We can debate whether recruiting winning sports teams is a legitimate state function — something about which we are dubious. But a more productive use of our time might be to use Mr. Eckstrom’s out-of-context raw numbers not as an endpoint but as a jumping-off point, for an exploration of what’s going on at agencies that have particularly high out-of-state travel and conference costs.
What we suspect we would find there is not the need for arbitrary caps on spending, but further confirmation that the Legislature needs to enact better checks to prevent taxpayer-funded junkets.
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